Introducing: Trading for the 21st century

Recently, our exclusive Turkish partner İş Yatırım, launched a marketing campaign featuring its brand-new offering, TradeMasterFX Plus powered by Tradable trading technology. When watching the advertisement, you’ll notice that the key feature of the platform is unlike that of many other trading platforms − in fact, at first glance, it might not feel like an advertisement for a trading platform at all. As the CEO & Co-founder of Tradable, I’d like to offer some insight into why we build Tradable and why we believe it brings trading into the 21st century.

Most trading platforms in the market today are still based on technology that dates back to the late 90s. At a time when trading was reserved mainly for heavy institutions on Wall St. and select individuals that had to place phone calls to their brokerage in order to place orders. With the uprising of the Internet, the process of getting a quote, placing a trade, and getting a confirmation, suddenly all happened on your screen, within milliseconds. This greatly democratized the access to the financial markets and brought about e-trading as we know it today.

The problem facing many traders today, however, is that trading is not just about getting a quote and placing a trade anymore. There’s much more to becoming a successful trader than that. A quick look into the various trading communities flourishing online will show you the simple truth that traders are different. There are different philosophies, trading styles and trading tools, which sets good traders apart from bad ones. A quick Google search for “financial trading tools” will list over 100,000,000 search results. And for good reason: Like a contractor, a carpenter or a software developer − it’s difficult to succeed in trading without the right tools. But how do you find the right tools in a world where you get over a hundred million search results when searching your topics? The bottom line is that while there is a great number of tools out there to help traders trade better, with today’s traditional platforms, it’s difficult to find the right tools and to make them work with your existing trading platform.

In a world where there is a wealth of information available, the challenge becomes arranging it, rather than producing it. So when we started Tradable, we threw out the traditional rulebook for financial trading and fundamentally tried to re-think how you would build a trading platform for the 21st century: In an era where the world’s largest transportation company (Uber) doesn’t own any cars, where the world’s most popular media owner (Facebook) creates no content and the world’s most valuable retailer (Alibaba) has no inventory – how do you build a smarter, sustainable and more valuable trading platform?

The answer we found in combining the best of the sharing economy, cloud computing and modern user experiences.

We’ve designed Tradable from the bottom up not just to be a platform for trade execution, but to be a one-stop-shop for all your trading needs. We do this by bringing all of your trading tools into the trading platform environment. When all your trading tools sit within one integrated platform, they can all talk with each other, which makes everything much smarter and much easier. Your risk management tool knows when your automated trading tool just sent an order to the market. If you forgot to protect it, it can automatically protect it for you. Your charting applications know what positions you have and can visualize those in real-time. Your audio alert tool can provide you visual and audio notifications when your margin settings are about to get hit.

Moreover, as an open platform, we crowd-source these tools from some of the most experienced traders in the world and makes them available for any clients of our brokerage partners, with the click of a button. In other words, you install the platform once. And from there, you can add any trading tool integrated with your account with simply one click.

Since our launch in 2012, we quickly went on to gain recognition from our industry peers by being voted “Most Innnovative Financial Product” at the largest industry trade show. We believe the recognition comes from realizing that an open model where people can share their trading tools in a much easier way, ultimately benefits everyone; brokers, developers and traders alike. Since our inception, we have launched in markets such as the US, Japan and the UK, providing new ways of idea generation, trade entry, risk management, technical analysis and much more. And we’re excited to have finally brought this to the Turkish marketplace as well.

This paradigm shift from a world of fragmented, disconnected trading tools to having everything integrated in one, beautiful and easy to use trading experience, is what Tradable and TradeMasterFX Plus is all about. And it’s how we envision a trading platform should work in the 21st century.